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April 10, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
50:19
Episode 486 Scott Adams: HOAXES, Buttigieg, Healthcare, Israel, Candace Owens, More
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Just being grateful.
Grateful to the day.
Alright, let us start with my favorite story of the day.
I hope you all saw Candace Owens just, to use Jack Posobiec's term and his tweet, Candace Owens just absolutely torched Ted Lieu in the testimonies.
Now, if you haven't seen it yourself, It's just one of the greatest things you'll ever see live, you know, in terms of political activity.
So the setup here is that some time ago there was an event in which Candace Owens made some kind of a Hitler reference when explaining how nationalism that she sees it, the American kind of nationalism, has nothing to do with Hitler.
So what she was saying in context, if you understand what she was saying and you hear the whole question and you hear the context, is that American nationalism has nothing to do with whatever Hitler was doing.
Perfectly acceptable statement, nothing to say about it.
Ted Lieu totally catches her by surprise, I would say, and plays the clip out of context And if you just hear the clip out of context, it makes it seem, and I have to be honest, it makes it seem to dumb people.
Nobody smart would have this interpretation, but dumb people hear it out of context and they say, wait a minute, I think Candace Owens just praised Hitler.
Now, let me say a few things.
If there's one rule that can help you a lot, In understanding the world and what is true and what is not true.
And it's the Scott Alexander rule, and I talk about this all the time, Scott Alexander being the nom de plume of an anonymous blogger who first introduced me to this idea.
And the idea is that when you see a news story that on its surface seems impossible, almost every time you're going to find out it wasn't true.
So here's the example, just a perfect example.
So Ted Lieu, in front of the world, believes that he's found the only black woman in the United States who's willing to praise Hitler in public, knowing that she's a political figure and that her job is to talk in public.
And Ted Lieu believes that a young, educated black woman He stood in front of people with the cameras rolling in public and praised Hitler.
Ted Lieu thought that happened.
Now, did you need to hear the full context of Candace's actual comments to know that that never happened?
No. You should not even need to hear the details of the story.
You should just hear the story and say, An educated, successful black woman who speaks in public for a living and knows that she's in public and talking and that everybody's going to report what she says.
And you're reporting that she praised Hitler.
No, you don't need to dig into the details.
You don't need to know the details to know that didn't happen.
And indeed, it did not happen.
So Ted Lieu, and I usually don't say this About people who are just playing politics and, you know, they're taking the team sports seriously.
So there's some amount of Ted Lieu that I can handle.
And in fact, he and I have traded some tweets.
And although we disagreed on most things, he seemed like a nice guy, you know, just on Twitter.
He seemed like a nice guy just doing his political best to support his team.
But this time, he crossed the line.
Oh my God.
This is not politics.
What Ted Lieu attempted and failed to do to Candace Owens is not politics.
It's just despicable.
Or it's mental illness.
And I'm not sure I can tell which one it is.
But there are only two possibilities that I can think of.
There may be other possibilities as well that I can't think of.
You always have to keep that possibility open.
But the two explanations for what Ted did were either that he's a horrible human being who doesn't care about the health of the country or the well-being of people in general.
I mean, just one interpretation that would explain the facts...
He's just one of the worst people who's ever lived.
I mean, what he did, if he knew it was not true, and he did it anyway, that is despicable on a level that we rarely see.
And so, I don't think that's what happened.
Consistent with my Scott Alexander theory, I'm going to say that the most outlandish explanation of what happened there is that Ted Lieu knew exactly what he was doing and did it anyway.
Now, you can't say there's no chance of that happening, but you also can't say there's no chance that an educated, successful black woman who talks in public for a living praise Hitler.
I mean, it didn't happen, and you should have known it didn't happen as soon as you've heard it.
But likewise, let's take the same thinking.
Let's be consistent. Let's take it to Ted.
Is it likely that he knew it was fake, he knew that she did not praise Hitler, and that he did it anyway in public, of course knowing that he would give pride for it?
Maybe. Maybe.
People are saying, Scott, you're naive.
What I'm saying is that the most predictive rule you'll ever see is that if it looks really, really unlikely that that could be true, it probably isn't.
Not every time, but almost certainly it isn't.
Because the other explanation is totally ordinary.
You have an extraordinary explanation that he said this in public knowing it's false.
Now, politicians lie in public all the time, but this particular one was so awful that you'd really have to think twice before doing this intentionally.
Maybe. Maybe he did.
But there's an ordinary explanation that he's just like everybody else who is an anti-Trumper, and that he's experiencing an actual hysteria.
We know that that's universally, not universally, but it's massively true for lots of people.
So I don't think there's any question that a lot of people fall into that category.
So I'm going to accept as probably true, don't know for sure, can't read his mind, but probably he's acting in the most normal, ordinary way that we've seen lots of people act, which is he believes it happened.
They actually believed that an educated black woman who talks in front of people for a living praised Hitler.
Actually believes that.
Now that is scary, but it's also ordinary, because you can see lots of other people believing a variety of hoaxes about Trump.
But I just needed to, if you haven't seen it, I just need to play the clip.
Because you're going to see one of the greatest public...
Demonstrations, I don't know, just public mastery you're ever going to see.
So I'll set it up for you.
So Candace hears herself get slimed by Ted Lieu, and she can't speak right away because the rules allow other people to speak before she gets her say.
So by the time she gets to talk, you can see from the longer video, you can see that she's just seething.
You can see the power kind of welling up inside her.
It's just wonderful to watch, just her actual expression, because you can see just the power forming.
And then when she talks...
She just kills it.
She just slays it.
She lays out the problem.
She lays out why he was lying.
She puts it in context.
And it's just masterful.
And I've got to play it for you. Let's see if we can get this to play.
We just started recording.
Would you like time to respond to that?
Yes, I think it's pretty apparent that Mr.
Loop believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety.
He purposely presented an extractive clip.
The witness will suspend for a moment.
It is not proper to refer disparagingly to a member of the committee.
The witness will not do that again.
All right, I have to stop it there.
So Nadler interrupts her.
And says you can't speak disparagingly of somebody.
And so Nadler, old Nads as I like to call them, thinks that Candace just called Ted Lieu stupid.
That didn't happen.
So Nadler actually is experiencing a hallucination right in public.
He imagines that Candace said something that she clearly didn't say.
What she said is that Ted Lieu is smart because, well, I guess this is the wrong way to put it, or that she's accusing him of trying to be clever in assuming that black people will not go check the full video.
Now, she's right, and...
So is Ted Lieu.
People are not going to go check the video.
We are, but most people won't, right?
So she's right about that.
So first of all, you see Nadler push her off her game, right?
So she starts talking, she gets into her zone, and he just pushes her off her game.
Now watch her recover.
Witness may continue.
Sure. Even though I was called despicable.
Witness may not refer to a member of the committee as stupid.
Now watch this. I didn't refer to him as stupid.
That's not what I said. Right.
That's not what I said at all. It's not.
You didn't listen to what I said.
You didn't listen to what he said?
Now watch him. Yeah, continue.
Then Nadler just goes. As I said.
He's assuming that black people will not go pursue the full two-hour clip.
And he purposefully extracted, he cut off, and you didn't hear the question that was asked of me.
He's trying to present as if I was launching a defense of Hitler in Germany, when in fact, the question that was asked of me was pertaining to whether or not I believed in nationalism, and that nationalism was bad.
And what I responded to was that I do not believe that we should be characterizing Hitler as a nationalist.
He was a homicidal, psychopathic maniac That killed his own people.
A nationalist would not kill their own people.
That's exactly what I was referring to in the clip, and he purposely wanted to give you a cut-up similar to what they do to Donald Trump to create a different narrative.
That was unbelievably dishonest, and he did not allow me to respond to it, which is worrisome to tell you a lot about where people are today in terms of trying to drum up narratives.
By the way, I would like to also add that I work for Prager University, which is run by an Orthodox Jew, and a single Democrat showed up to the embassy opening in Jerusalem.
I sat on a plane for 18 hours to make sure that I was there.
I'm deeply offended by the insinuation of revealing that clip without the question that was asked of me.
Oh! God, that's good.
So good. How old is she?
Imagine when she is 55.
You know, that...
That skill level, just, you know, she's 29.
Just fast forward that in your mind.
She's 30. Fast forward that in your mind to how good she's going to be at 55, because she's already better than everybody in that room.
I mean, she's testifying to Congress and making them look like idiots.
Very entertaining. All right.
Now, let me hit a few other topics here.
We've got a lot going on. A while ago, I said that Kamala Harris seemed to be the pick of CNN and the mainstream media.
They seem to be sending her love letters.
But she has gotten forgotten.
She has been forgotten lately.
And so I asked myself, have they soured on her?
Now, there's no rule that says that the mainstream media can't be for somebody in the beginning and then change their mind if that person doesn't get any traction.
And that looks like that might be happening.
It appears, and we'll have to keep watching, but there's starting to be a hint, a little bit of a clue, that Pete Buttigieg, am I saying that correctly, might be the new chosen one.
Here's why that makes sense.
Remember that the Democratic Party is the party of identity.
You've got your women, you've got your black people, your Hispanics, your every other minority, you've got your LGBTQ. So each of these entities within the Democratic Party want to have their voice heard.
They would like to have a leader who is like them.
The two biggest categories, I would think, would be women, who would have the most power, I would think, And the black voters who are Democrat, who also are a big enough unified bloc, the way they vote, that they're also super powerful.
If you get both the black vote and the woman vote on the Democrat side, you're in good shape.
Because you probably get the gay vote too, because the Democrats seem more suited for that community.
And so that would be a good solid group.
But, if you don't have the right candidate, and you're a candidate who checks the right boxes, Kamala Harris is a woman, she's a person of color, that's a strong package, and she's got experience, she's good on camera, but she's boring.
And I don't know if the news wants to cover a boring A boring candidate or even worse, a boring president.
It's just boring.
So if you're the Democrats and you can't decide, can we get enough people to back a black candidate?
Let's say Cory Booker.
Can we get enough people to back a woman candidate?
Let's say Elizabeth Warren or anybody else.
And if the answer is no, what do you do if you still want to win?
I think you pick the compromise candidate.
I think you pick the gay guy.
Because he...
First of all, he's probably the only star, as far as I can tell.
Buttigieg is the only one who's got some star quality.
You know, to say some things that get him some information.
I'm sorry, to get him some attention.
And I would not be surprised...
If the Democrats decide that he's sort of the compromise, and as weird as this sounds, I'm going to say it, you know, with love.
There's no... What I'm going to say now, I'm not...
This is no insult intended.
So if you imagine there is, that would be your imagination.
It seems that women...
And black Democrats may compromise that gay is as close as they can get to, to either being black or a woman.
Now, don't take that too literally.
All I'm saying is that he might be the one person everybody can agree on.
Because at least you don't get your straight white male president if he wins.
Right? At least you got something.
At least you got something.
So I would keep an eye out for Buttigieg, Buttigieg being the new media favorite.
We'll see if he catches on.
There is a non-zero chance that the simulation will serve up a democratic ticket that is Buttigieg and Swalwell.
I'm not going to add a joke because it would be inappropriate.
But I'm just telling you that the simulation might serve that up.
And then you'll hear some bad jokes.
But I'm not going to make any.
I'm just saying. That might be coming.
All right. I've been saying to people, let me back up a little bit.
So yesterday I retweeted a tweet that Jack Dorsey tweeted.
It was an article from The Atlantic, I guess.
And the article was about a guy who's trying to figure out if he can codify some rules For discussions and debate.
If you come up with some techniques, some guidelines, some way to more productively debate each other.
Because as you know, you've been watching.
And you can see that...
You can see that people don't really debate each other.
They debate at cross purposes.
And one of his speculations, the person in this Atlantic article, is that people such as artists Can't isolate problems.
In other words, they are combiners by nature, so they see everything as connected.
Whereas there are some people who can isolate a variable.
People like scientists, people like economists, people like engineers.
And the idea is that once you could recognize in the public that there are some people who just can't do that, You'll understand why they're trying to have the same conversation, but they're not.
And I'll give you my example.
I've been saying to people online, on Twitter, that I oppose President Trump putting children in Obama cages.
Now you see what I'm doing there, right?
I'm first of all branding the Obama cages because I think most of them, if not all of them, were built during the Obama administration and there were kids in it, but for different reasons.
Now people argue and they say, why are you blaming this all on Obama?
Don't you know that President Trump put kids in cages?
To which I say, I just said that.
I said I oppose President Trump putting children In Obama cages.
And the people who are the artists, shall I say, can't process it.
Because they live in a world where Obama good, Trump bad.
And they don't live in a world where someone like me could say maybe they both need to have done better.
Why can't I say?
I wish Obama had not put anybody in a cage.
I also wish President Trump would put nobody in the cage.
Now, I don't have a better idea.
If you're asking me, hey, Scott, what are you going to do instead of this?
Because, you know, there are too many people, and if you don't do this or that, you've got other problems.
To which I say, totally true.
It's not an easy problem to solve.
It wasn't easy for Obama.
It's not easy for Trump, and he's got more people coming.
None of it's good. But it's also not my job.
I'm not the president.
And as a citizen, I get to criticize my presidents.
So for me, it's a fair statement to say, I oppose President Trump putting children in Obamacages.
But watch how people respond to that.
They can't get around the fact that you would dislike it in both cases, and they can't get around the fact that Trump's doing it, but they're Obama cages.
Just watch how people try to process it.
If you see somebody who can instantly sort those out, If you see somebody who can isolate those and say, oh yeah, it's true that Obama did this, it was that situation.
It's true that Trump did this, slightly different situation.
It's both immigration, but they had slightly different situations and different numbers of people.
If you see anybody who's smart enough to break it down like that, probably you can end up agreeing.
But if somebody just can't even process the fact that you could say that both of them should not have put kids in cages, but you don't have a better idea, you can watch people spin.
It's fun. All right.
In no particular order...
There's a story that there's a Nobel Prize winner, so a scientist that we can take seriously won the Nobel Prize, who says that in several years he believes they can figure out how to use lasers to neutralize nuclear waste.
In days. So instead of waiting thousands or hundreds of years for your nuclear waste to decay, the scientist is pretty sure that with a few years of work, a few years might be 10 years, but from an engineering perspective, it looks doable. They can actually zap the waste with a laser and neutralize it.
Now, I'm not saying that will necessarily work.
Anytime you hear a report of something that they think they can do in 10 years, you have to take that with a grain of salt.
It might be a flying cars sort of thing.
I only mention it because when you're trying to predict 80 years into the future, You can't, because people are inventing stuff you didn't see coming.
How many of you would have said, well, if we're going to look 80 years in the future, you should certainly calculate that in 10 years we'll probably be able to use a laser on our nuclear waste to make it safe.
Nobody would have thought of that.
That's how the future is.
It's completely unpredictable because of developments such as that.
All right. You may have heard the...
Let's talk a little bit more about Generation 4.
So, it's not my imagination, is it, that there are more and more people who are talking about Generation 4 nuclear.
Now, I think Bill Gates gets most of the credit here, because I understand he did do a tour through Washington in which he talked to important people and made his case.
I'm sure he was persuasive.
Because if Bill Gates comes to talk to you about nuclear, you'll listen.
You'll listen. And you should.
So probably he primed the pump within the government.
Mark Schneider and I and others on Twitter are trying to educate people on the fact that Generation 4 is safe from meltdowns.
It's designed so meltdowns can't happen even if everything goes wrong.
And that they eat the nuclear waste from existing nuclear sites.
Those are pretty hard to refute.
We would need some development, but I'm sure we can get there.
So... I feel pretty optimistic that the green nuclear deal will inevitably become a bigger part of the solution.
We can certainly do that if we want to.
All right. I have criticized President Trump for saying that he's going to wait on health care.
That he's going to wait.
And I've said, that's no, waiting is not a policy.
You get an F for healthcare.
So I've graded the president an F in healthcare because he has no plan.
Even a bad plan is better than no plan at all.
Now he says he's going to come up with a plan, and I was critical of that.
It felt like just abdicating his responsibility.
But I've thought about it a little longer.
And I'm going to I'm going to adjust my opinion.
It is still a failing grade that there's no plan.
So I still give the president an F for health care because he doesn't have a plan.
But from a political point of view, it probably is exactly the right thing to wait as long as possible.
I don't like it.
I don't like it.
But it's almost certainly true that he should wait as long as possible before giving any details.
Because if he does ultimately come up with any details close to the election, Then you still have something to talk about, and you will forget that he used to have no details.
So as long as he does it, he's still going to be able to recover from the fact that we thought he was failing right up to the time he comes up with a plan.
Once he comes up with a plan, then you can criticize it, of course, and people will.
But until then, he's got all the Democrats are going to be coming out with their dumbass plans.
And let's face it, they're not going to be practical plans.
And they're all going to be attacking each other, and he's going to be attacking them.
But nobody can attack his plan, because he doesn't have one.
He doesn't have one.
It probably makes perfect sense politically to let the Democrats get out there and just get savaged for every idea that they come up with until he sees what works and what doesn't.
So by the time the president comes up with whatever he comes up with, And not being optimistic that he'll come up with anything.
But if he does, it's going to be the result of having seen all the stuff that didn't work in the public's opinion.
That's a gigantic advantage.
Gigantic. And so I'm going to give him a persuasion.
It might be an A-plus in terms of political decisions.
In terms of what's good for the country, we'd like to see the play.
And if he doesn't ever come up with it, it just stays an F. So it's great as an F, but politically, I can't say it's a bad decision, just strategy-wise.
Let me toss out a plan.
All right? I'm going to toss out a plan, but I have to check one message first to make sure that...
Okay.
Here's my plan for a Republican health care plan.
And I don't claim this is a good plan.
This is a plan I want to throw out and see how you react to it.
So, here would be the approach.
The approach would be to say, instead of going in and fixing every little detail of healthcare, the best you can do, because it's so complicated and nobody really understands it, is to fix every instance in which there is not a market competitive situation.
So, in other words, the Republican plan Could be nothing more than whatever it takes to improve the competitive situation.
If they only did that, they'd have a pretty strong case.
It wouldn't be an immediate benefit, but people could see, oh, that makes sense.
All of our problems are because the competitive situation with healthcare is broken.
So if you could just fix what makes it competitive, you'd have a good argument, even if it wasn't a good plan.
So here's my suggestion.
Suppose you just added one option, which is that you could buy into and pay for Medicare.
So you keep the free Medicare for the old people just the way it is.
No change. But you add an option that somebody can pay, a younger person, can simply pay and buy into it.
But here's the thing.
The price for the people buying in would be below market rates.
And it would be, even if it had to be artificially set, it would be set below market.
And you also keep all of the private plans exactly the way they are.
So now you've created a situation where the private plans will have to compete against the buy-in Medicare plan, where the cost per month is lower than the private plans.
So they're going to have to work on their cost structure, or else they're going to lose X number of people who said, you know, my private plan is definitely better.
The private plan is better, but it's more expensive, and I need to save money.
So I'm going to go with the one that's, say, 25% cheaper.
As soon as you do that, you've created a situation where the private industry has to compete harder.
And here's the benefit.
It's simple. I just explained an idea to you and you all understood it.
And the moment you understood it, you said, my God, competition was the problem.
We can't dig into every detail of how everything works and who the insurers are and who's in the middle and payments and the government making decisions.
So why don't we change nothing except competition?
Adding a price tag for an opt-in option for Medicare.
Then Medicare can slowly improve.
The private industry can slowly improve.
And then at the same time, you're working on lowering the costs for the entry-level version of healthcare.
Now, as I've said before, companies like mine interface by WinHub.
We've got an app where you can talk to any expert for a fee.
These could be healthcare experts.
In fact, we have doctors on there now that you could get a second opinion or a first opinion.
So, technology will continue making low-cost healthcare Workable by creating lower cost techniques.
So apparently there are a number of sensors and test devices you can attach to your phone now to make your phone practically a Star Trek tricorder.
You can do everything from your EEGs to your...
I think you can do maybe some blood sugar tests and stuff.
So pretty soon, if you don't have a job, but you do have a phone, you're going to have 75% of what you need for healthcare in terms of expertise.
So anyway, the point would be that if the Republican plan looked like increasing competition, and they could do that in a number of different ways, it might be a package of, let's say, Ten changes.
They might be executive orders.
They might be recommendations for Congress to change the law.
But in every case, the only point of any of the changes is to improve market competition.
There's no other objective.
And that would be a suggestion for a plan.
Anyway, it's got to be simple and it's got to be something that can improve on its own over time.
And what I described might get you there.
All right. I saw a study that said only 12% of Americans believe CNN is not biased and has no political leanings.
So 12% of people said CNN is not politically biased.
And I thought to myself, who the hell are these 12%?
Where do you find 12% of the public who believes that CNN is not biased?
How the hell is there anybody who has that opinion?
That's my only comment on that was that it was funny.
If you're following the news from Israel, you know that they had a big election.
And the news, as far as I understand it, they may still be counting some votes, but I understand that Prime Minister Netanyahu has won enough support to remain prime minister.
What they haven't reported is that apparently Hillary won the popular vote.
That's just my joke.
All right. Do what you will with that.
That's my joke of the day.
I also wondered if Russia interfered.
You know, President Trump is being accused of interfering in Israel's election because he made some agreements about recognizing the Golan Heights just about, you know, ahead of the election, which would be good for Netanyahu.
So people would say, hey, President Trump, you interfered in Israel's election.
And, you know, I think you could make a case for that.
But I wondered...
Wouldn't Russia want to interfere with that election?
And if not, why not?
Wouldn't Russia have an enormous interest in what happens in Israel?
Now, I don't know if Russia would prefer Netanyahu or prefer the other one.
I don't know. But it seems like they would have interfered.
I mean, why wouldn't they?
Wouldn't they? What would stop them?
They have an interest.
They have the ability. I think they would.
So I wonder if we'll ever hear anything about that.
Let's see. I wanted to talk to you about my hoax funnel.
So I call this the hoax funnel, and I use it for the find people hoax, which is popping up even again today, and I've been commenting to people.
So when I comment to people that their belief that Trump ever called the racists in Charlottesville fine people, I always take them on a journey that is weirdly predictable.
If you say to somebody, oh, you fell for a...
You fell for a hoax.
Here's the transcript, and you can see in clear words that Trump says, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
They should be totally condemned.
So you show them that, and you can see that their belief that he had not said those exact words is falsified.
They can play the video, they can look at the transcripts, and they'd be completely convinced that their prior belief That the president called the racist fine people was false.
But do they then say, my God, I've been fooled by the media.
I changed my opinion.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for correcting me.
They never say that. Almost 100% of them say the same thing.
And if you've been watching me trying to straighten people out on Twitter, you know they say the same thing.
They say... But those people were marching with the neo-Nazis, so nobody marches with the neo-Nazis unless they're, you know, racists.
And then I say, there's no evidence of anybody marching with the racists.
You've just hallucinated a second thing.
So then I say, no, they were simply in the same zip code for entirely different reasons.
And here's an article from the New York Times where they interviewed one of the people who cared about the historical monuments, did not march with the racists, and do not like racists.
In fact, one of their group, one of the people in the group was black.
So are you believing that there was a black guy marching with a tiki torch neo-Nazis?
Is that what you think?
And then I show another article where there's a greater discussion of that group.
So they apparently go wherever there are historical monuments and free speech issues, and that's their deal.
They don't really care about the topic so much as the free speech.
So once I've demonstrated that there were, in fact...
People who were not the racist, not marching with them, and were there for constitutional support reasons, what do people say?
Do they say, oh my God, I've been hoaxed twice.
Once when I believed that he called the marchers fine people, and once when I believed that there was no one else there who could have been described as a fine people.
Do they say that? No, never.
What they say is, But Scott, nobody goes to an event that was advertised as a white supremacist neo-Nazi event unless they're a little bit neo-Nazi, etc. And, of course, there's no support for that, and the people who did go give their reasons, they go to other things for the same reasons.
It's very clear that that's not apparent.
But usually they say they'll end up on something like, when I've taken them down the hoax funnel, so the funnel is at the top, they say, oh, he called racist fine people, and then, no, no, well, okay, he didn't mean the racist, but he meant the people marching with them.
Okay, they weren't marching with them, But they must be racist because, well, okay, they were just there for free speech and historical support of monuments.
You know, it's like being against ISIS, right?
Nobody likes the monuments to be taken down.
Although I'm opposed to the Confederate statues, personally.
That's just me. Now, once you take them down, they will usually get to the point where they just say, okay, anybody who's in favor...
Of racist Confederate monuments, in their view, must be not a good person.
To which I say, thank you for admitting that you got conned by this hoax, because you started out saying that the President talked about the marching people, and you ended up with just an opinion about statues.
So that's the hoax funnel.
I always take them down. And I did something funny when I was correcting somebody's hoax today.
I forget his name, some blue check guy.
And I told him his argument ahead of time.
And I left a tweet thread.
You can see that. It's at the top of my Twitter.
In which I tell him what he's going to say next, and then I tell him the response.
And then I tell him what he's going to say next, and the response to that.
It's kind of funny. You should see it.
Alright, let's talk about Trump and all of his firings of his advisors and cabinet people.
Now the news has reported that Trump is, I don't know, his usual impulsive chaos, doesn't know what he's doing, he's firing everybody, it's a massive layoff, blah blah blah.
To which I say, Have I ever taught you my trick of never wasting a bad day?
I've taught you that, right?
So those of you who have been following me for a while, you know I've talked about this.
If you have a really bad day and there's nothing you can do about it, there's something that's going to happen that day, or let's say you have to fire somebody.
If you have to fire somebody, it's usually a bad day for you, too, because that's not fun, right?
Nobody likes to fire people.
It's a bad day for you, too, and there's nothing you can do about it because you've decided you're going to do it.
What's the best thing you can do that day?
Fire everybody. Who needs to get fired?
Not everybody who exists.
But you should do them all at the same time because your day is going to suck.
If your day is going to suck anyway, get it all out.
Do all of the unpleasant stuff right away.
Just get it done.
Because, you know, the president would have got picked to death for every person he fired, but he just did it all at once.
Just fire a bunch of people, make some big changes, just get it all done.
And then the media gets sort of lost in the details.
It's like, well, it was this guy and this woman and this person and that person.
And then it just becomes this weird detailed story that nobody cares about.
So, I think that you cannot distinguish from the outside what is chaos and randomness in the White House from what is the most rational strategy that I've ever used, which is I bunch up, you know, I batch up all of my bad activities and do them at the same time.
So I don't have a bad month, I'll just put it in a week.
Put it in a week, and I'm done.
All right. I think those are the main things I've got to say.
Anybody have any questions?
Somebody was funny there.
They said, I think it's clear that it's the beginning of the end for drunk.
I'll take that as a joke and not reality.
How does a passive fail system work?
So that's the question about generation four.
How can you have a situation in which everything could go wrong and you would not have a meltdown?
I'll give it to you in a high-level explanation, and I'll let Mark Schneider correct me if I get the high-level explanation wrong.
My understanding is that the old nuclear technology, you had to keep water under pressure so that you had pressurized things, and if you lost power...
You would lose your pressurized containment and then bad things could happen such as meltdowns.
So losing power would lose your ability to contain the reaction with the old sites.
The new generation 4 is built in the reverse, meaning that the only way you can have a reaction is if the power is continually applied and everything is going right.
The moment that anything changes from that situation, you lose power or something else goes wrong, let's say a human action, then you've lost the perfect condition to create the reaction.
So the reaction just stops or slows down in a way that's easy to control because you stopped making it powerful.
The old ones are the opposite.
The reaction was going to be happening And the best you could do is put your technology on it to control it.
So if any of those controls went bad, you get a disaster.
With the new ones, it doesn't matter what goes wrong.
If anything goes wrong, it just can't be a nuclear thing anymore.
It just stops being a reaction.
At the moment, it doesn't work perfectly.
So, now, I can't tell you that I'm some expert on nuclear, as I think you could tell by that bad explanation, but that's the general idea.
Will I run in 2024?
I would never expose myself to that ridiculous edge.
And I think you would agree that I'm more useful doing what I'm doing.
Can you talk about Obama's speech-making skills?
Yeah, so I think a lot of you saw the clip of Obama talking about the circular firing squad.
Did you see that?
I have to do an impression.
First, I'm going to do an impression of President Trump on a rally, talking to a crowd, and President Trump makes a joke.
And here's President Trump enjoying the joke.
The crowd, laughter.
People are dying. They're screaming.
They're chanting. They're laughing at President Trump's humor.
And then I watched this clip of Obama, and I'd forgotten how boring he is.
You lose track of how boring he is.
And he's giving his speech, and he's walking around on stage, and he tries to make this joke about the...
Circular firing squad.
It's like a...
It's like I call it a circular firing squad.
And there's no reaction.
Like he tells his joke and nobody's laughing.
He's like...
Because they form a circle.
And then it's like they're shooting at each other.
Silence.
Now, you don't really know...
I mean, you don't remember Obama as being that boring until you've had such a dose of President Trump that the contrast is more obvious.
Honestly, I used to enjoy listening to Obama talk.
I thought, wow, that guy's pretty good at this.
He's good at this.
I can see why he got elected president.
He's got some skills.
But then you see him in contrast and you go, I may have overrated his oration abilities.
Oh, all right.
I think we've got enough for now.
Oh, where is the slaughter meter?
So since I revised my thoughts about the healthcare strategy, I can still dislike the fact that there's no plan while evaluating the election from a political standpoint.
From a political standpoint, I'm going to put the slaughter meter back at 100%.
100%.
If nothing changed and everything just sort of went the way it's going, which won't happen, by the way, The slaughter meter is not a prediction of the endpoint.
It's a prediction that if nothing changed, that's where you'd end up.
Something always changes, right?
So it's a slaughter meter, and right now it's at 100%.
If nothing changed, the president would have probably an epic electoral outcome.
Alright, so that's where we are.
100% on the slaughter meter.
I added at 50%, but I've re-evaluated.
And there's one other thing I wanted to talk about, but I'll save that for tomorrow.
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